December 4

The holiday season is upon us. Not long ago, family, food, and festivities have descended on unsuspecting folks’ schedules, and in just a few more days, family, food, and festivities will descend once again. The break in between, at least in America, is often jam-packed with shopping, traffic, and more than a little merry chaos. The holidays are conceptually times for reflection, and often it’s easy to get stuck in the motions for the holidays rather than the mindfulness the holidays are meant to represent in the first place.

That said, practicing mindfulness and reflection is our goal here at Critical Distance, so let’s all take a second to reflect and ponder on This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Thus, the game expresses racial anger obliquely, directing it not towards real structures that lawfully maintain oppression like the police force, but towards fictional abstractions like the Southern Union and the Italian mafia. Rather than confront the historical sources of oppression in New Orleans as outlined by Whitaker and Moore, Mafia III defers to fictionalization that obscures the relationship between racism and state politics.

The World Within Games

The Trump Game List | MediumKawika Guillermo looks at a list of games that illustrate a potential bleak future for Americans under a Trump administration.

But we can?—?and we must?—?offer different definitions of power, different fantasies for different people. If we’re creating our dream worlds in these designs and devices, there must be room for the idea that not all of us have the same kinds of dreams.

This is what it looks like when a man is obviously, painfully attracted to his best friend, but I suppose the consequences of returning those feelings are just too high to offer it as a dialogue option. Why else would Telltale dangle the possibility, only to snatch it away?

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If you have any articles you think we should be paying attention to, feel free to pass them along to us! More information could be found on Critical Distance’s How To Contribute page. That’s it from us this week, apologies for the delay and downtime this Sunday, and looking forward to seeing what will be arriving in games writing this next week!